Category: Philippine-American War

This is a section of an op-ed I wrote a while ago for the NYT, which eventually declined to publish it. So I sent a longer version of it to CNN Philippines. That CNN piece was called “Duterte and Philippine Revolutionary History,” link here. Below are just comments on the Pershing issue that I had included in the original nyt op-ed.

…….”The American commanders of their nation’s first war in Asia, template of the messes that came after—Vietnam, Laos, Iraq, Iraq 2, et cetera—were veteran Civil War generals (Union and Confederate) who also later slaughtered the Sioux, Comanches, Kiowas, or, in the case of Henry Lawton, “was a national hero for his part in the capture of the Apache chief Geronimo.” Russell Roth in Muddy Glory: America’s ‘Indian Wars’ in the Philippines, 1899-1935 quotes Theodore Roosevelt, “The reasoning that justifies our having made war against Sitting Bull justifies our [having made war against the Filipinos].” Arthur MacArthur, father of Douglas and known as General Sherman of Northern Luzon, depended on his fellow ‘Indian-killer’ officers to scorch Luzon, the Philippines’s largest island, into surrender.

Perhaps the most famous ‘Indian fighter’ was John “Black Jack” Pershing, General of the Armies in World War I and in 1911 governor of Mindanao island—where Davao, Duterte’s city, lies, and beyond which Bud Dajo smolders. Pershing commanded a second Battle of Bud Dajo, pursuing Muslim fighters by lining his men at the lip of the volcano and killing 500 at the same crater. By then, Mark Twain [note: Twain had written about the first Bud Dajo masacre in 1906] was not alive to recall it in scathing anathema and patriotic loathing.

The Filipino-American war is barely remembered, even by Filipinos. But Pershing’s obscure exploit saw light in an unlikely moment. Donald Trump evoked Pershing at a California rally, “He was a rough guy—and he had a terrorism problem…General Pershing sat high up in his horse, ramrod…and he caught fifty terrorists and dipped fifty bullets in pigs’ blood. And he had his men load his rifles, and he lined forty-nine of those people, and the fiftieth person, he said, you go back to your people, and you tell them what happened. And for twenty-five years, there was no problem.”

The Muslim insurgency in predominantly Catholic Philippines goes on today [note: this piece was written before Marawi], one hundred years later. The only true part of this garbled story of Pershing in Mindanao is that Trump’s fantasies of Muslims are just loony. But it tells us how this buried story of American colonization of the Philippines erupts. Farcically, in the lurid imagination of a bigoted sham like Trump, a character already thought up by that shrewd teller of American truths, Mark Twain, in his Duke-and-Dauphin con-man sections of Huckleberry Finn. Or tragically, in the sham anti-colonial rage of Rodrigo Duterte….”

I keep getting requests asking about what the novel Raymundo Mata means. I only know what it means from the writing of it. NOTE: This is a revised version of an essay appended to the Anvil publication of the novel. It is almost nine years away from that date of publication: another novena year.

On Finishing a Novel: Thoughts on Writing about Philippine History

I remember the solitude and satisfaction of beginning the novel that became, nine years later, The Revolution According to Raymundo Mata, which now arrives a full dozen years after my first book, Bibliolepsy. I remember the stillness of that spring midnight in New Hampshire. I had begun this farcical reconstruction of a solemn evening in the 1890s, in which Emilio Aguinaldo rides the calesa with the blind future katipunero Raymundo Mata, who plays an extremely minor role in history as the blind man who accompanies Pio Valenzuela to Dapitan on a fateful visit to the hero-novelist Rizal (ironically, the pair’s visit became the key incident cited by the Spanish judge in Rizal’s trial in 1896 as ‘proof’ that the novelist was the leader of Bonifacio’s revolution). I was laughing as I wrote what I thought would be the first chapter of a comic novel (it is Entry #25 in the finished draft): my daughter was asleep, my husband was in his hometown Worcester, Massachusetts, at his mother’s home, researching a novel of his own, and I was alone and exhilarated by the moment of starting a new novel.

There is nothing like the first pages of a new work—when one has finally discarded the trepidation and horror of beginning, and one simply begins. The horror of beginning lies in the immensity of a novel’s blankness. Any new novel leaves you on your own, worse than on a desert island, because it is a desertion and a bereavement of your own making. You build toward the angst of those first words, and so the frank release of that first chapter, when you begin, is an unspeakable pleasure, because to be honest—before you begin, it always seems impossible.

It is odd for me to recall now what I did not know then. That at the same time I happily began scratching out that novel, its first words, my husband, also writing, confronted his unspeakable solitude in his mother’s home. Not a word escapes to speak the immensity of his moment’s blankness. His death had no observer. And it is perhaps not so odd, though terrible and cruel, that I recognized this only after I had finished writing The Revolution According to Raymundo Mata: nine years after his inexplicable death. That I began this book on the eve of Arne’s death.

In this way we are blind to our deepest purposes, the gestures we make to survive. I strove against odds to return to this novel, after an abandonment of years, but I did not recognize until it was done why its completion was necessary.

For The Revolution According to Raymundo Mata is, on one hand, a novel about unfinished books.

I am publishing it nine years after beginning it. In the Philippines, of course, the end of the novenas marks the ninth year of mourning. And the ninth year, I guess, is meant to signal one must begin a new life. My recognition now is that despite the end of all novenas, my husband is still with me. And so he will always be. And in my mind’s eye he lives: eternally in the act of writing his undone novel. The past (as I understand it) is always present: our lives are haunted but no one dies, if memory serves us right.

I wrote my novel for my husband, Arne, who loved the Philippines and Rizal.

But the novel, of course, is not about him.

……….

Readers ask me how one comes to write a novel at all. The curse of the Filipino writer, it has been said, is that a first novel (of all things) created us, the stubborn illusion of our nationhood. Not only that, it created us absolutely and early: that book was Rizal’s Noli Me Tangere. The so-called Rizal curse is a fiction that condemns all our novelists to premature obsolescence, so we wail. But on the other hand: it is precisely the futility of our projects that may allow us to act.

Being a Filipino novelist can seem doubly irrelevant. At times it seems to me that being Filipino is fantastical enough—Filipinos are paradoxically ubiquitous yet invisible, a migrant everywhere but a known quantity nowhere; but being a novelist on top of that raises my sense of my absurdity up a notch. Who will read me? I have the strange gall of being comforted by that thought. Precisely because my audience must be invented, I feel freer to create.

……….

The seed for my novel about the revolution was double: one a dream, the other a voice. The first was a dream I had the year before I traveled to America to attend the graduate writing program at Johns Hopkins. It was 1986, the country was in the throes of the EDSA revolt, and I kept going to libraries. In my dream I was on a jeep, and a person was speaking German. I completely understood him (in real life I have absolutely no German): he was telling me I had to write some novel, and in this dust-swirled tongue he explained its entire plot. I woke up thinking—what a good plot. Then of course I had no memory of it. All I could remember was a jeepney (I fancy it was going to Blumentritt Street) and a rattling squall of dust following it, with the stranger exclaiming in German while he hangs from the back of the jeep like extra cargo. All that remained, I guess, was the dust.

At that time, I used to go to the embassy libraries in Manila. By 1986 the rallies were passing by new places, like Thomas Jefferson on Buendia in Makati; but way before that I would detour to the British Council because of its new fiction titles. I also liked to go nearby, to Goethe Institute, for two things: it possessed a facsimile copy of the novel Noli Me Tangere in Rizal’s hand and the double-volume German correspondence between Rizal and Ferdinand Blumentritt. For some reason, it moved me, in those days of the EDSA rebellion: to hold the facsimile copy of Rizal’s novel, even though I would not read it.

I had read the Noli in high school in Tagalog, and I could not relate to its Victorian syrup. I hated Maria Clara and the tragic odium of her sentimental end. I was also, at the time, rather Maoist, and I thought Crisostomo Ibarra was a coño balikbayan, a limited perceiver of his country’s ills. At Goethe, I read instead the letters Rizal wrote to his friend Blumentritt in Bohemia.

I knew my dream of the person speaking in German had something to do with finding Rizal in Goethe Institute—the dream was somehow a demand to write about that past trapped in the strange white walls of a German library during the height of a rebellion. Unfortunately, the dream was gobbledygook.

The voice I heard a few years later at Johns Hopkins was by no means gobbledygook. The clarity of that speaker’s erudition is luminous to me even now. This happened maybe in 1989 or 1990. I was newly married in a foreign country. My husband discovered that a historian was going to speak on campus about a Philippine novel, and he took me and a few others to listen to him. So there was that voice in a Baltimore auditorium talking about Crisostomo Ibarra walking through a piss-soaked cemetery in fictional San Diego, conjuring for me the phantom of my old dream, a return to an incoherent desire to articulate this past. The clarity of the speaker’s commentary on the literary qualities of the Noli Me Tangere struck me also as a kind of blow—a reproach.

I was caught by the profound empathy with which the speaker described the ironic style of Rizal. He rendered the ‘syrup’ text humorous; he called it complex. My husband demanded: why have you never told me about this writer Rizal? I had no defense. It was my husband who ended up looking for the novels, the Noli and the Fili, and making the Noli required reading for his students later on at the International School Manila when I moved my family back home. It was he who bought Santiago Alvarez’s Katipunan and the Revolution, which became so central to my novel because of the quotidian quality of its recollections of revolution (having diarrhea in the middle of battle in the rice paddies of Caloocan because of eating pakwan; the drunkenness of Matandang Leon, a tulisan turned revolutionary; a blind man being blindfolded when he is initiated into the Katipunan; et cetera, et cetera: a joy ride of consequential inconsequence).

We learned that the historian’s name was Benedict Anderson; in those days without Google, we had no idea what that savant did or why he knew so much about Rizal. All I knew was that his view of Rizal in that Hopkins lecture, the way he read him with wit and correctness as a terribly forgotten novelist, haunted me—while my ignorance rebuked me, though for a long time I did nothing to remedy it.

………

I went back to writing Raymundo Mata in 2005: what drove me to it is a mystery: I have no idea why or how I began to write. Because for seven years, I did not think I would get back to writing at all. I had finished a draft of one novel, Gun Dealers’ Daughter, the year my husband died, and I had begun a page of Raymundo Mata. In the 90s an agent contacted me about publishing Gun Dealer. But I had no heart in me to work on any of my books. I felt guilty about being a writer. I felt dread about being alive at all.

Instead, at his publisher’s request, I edited my husband’s novel, leo@fergusrules.com. The horror was that his first novel was accepted by a publisher two weeks after his death. The miracle was that it was accepted by a publisher two weeks after his death. I put away my novels’ drafts and worked two years on Arne’s book. It came out from Leapfrog Press in 2000.

On the other hand, in a sort of bravado, when friends asked what they could do for me, I would ask them to to scour the bookstores of Manila for works on the revolution. I don’t know what I was thinking: the fact was, for months I could barely read a newspaper. Those Philippine history books, which sat unread for years, signify for me the faith and support of friends: each book was an express act of generosity that silently told me one day I might work again.

In my mind I wished to return to that first writing night of comic exhilaration. In my heart I knew I couldn’t. But at the very least, I urged myself, I could read the books. Slowly, I did. Given a sabbatical, I began reading full-time. And as I read the history, the novel emerged. I wished to write a comic historical novel written like a puzzle. I made up rules for play, and the strictures I placed on myself seemed both amusing and necessary. I would enclose an entire history of Filipino texts—from balagtasan to bugtong, Bonifacio’s poetry to Mabini’s politics—wrapped in the search for a lost and longed-for novel. The book would have traps for the reader, dead-end jokes, textual games, unexplained sleights of tongue. I wished to write a funhouse-text. (Maybe my curse has never been Rizal; my curse, perhaps, is Nabokov.)

But at the same time, I wished to be true to the past I was plundering. My concept of Raymundo Mata, a cipher of history whose relatives are perhaps still alive, maybe living even now a stone’s throw from the Aguinaldo Shrine, is cut out of wholly imagined cloth. My invention of him as a ‘kelptobibliomaniac,’ a hapless fan of the writer Rizal, is entirely uncorroborated. But the details I conjured had to breathe through the prism of the life he actually lived.

The task was to see Rizal and his history from an ‘awry’ lens: in this case, the nightblind eye of a ‘kleptobibliomaniac,’ a wordy lover of books. From the start, I had this obscure desire to resurrect Rizal the writer—my ambition was to lay him bare for us as a man who, when all is said and done, only wished to finish a novel, not start a war. But the fact is, I know all I could do was clothe him in my own personal delusions.

………..

The task was huge—I needed to acquaint myself not only with the hero’s history but with all his work that I could find. And for some reason, I needed to feel “pure,” as if that were possible: I needed to conceive of history from my own vantage. In this way, I banned theorists and many secondary sources from my diet. First, I read only Rizal’s work itself. My favorites were his Miscellaneous Writings, a wonderful compendium that includes gossip in code and morbidity in scientific notes, and his supple, seductive second novel, El Filibusterismo, a narrative stew of tonal dexterity, a brilliant light polemic and bitter farce. My translation of a text singular in Rizal’s oeuvre, Memorias de un estudiante en Manila, an adolescent narrative I could not find in English, became the chance engine of the entire novel’s prose. In this way, plagiarism by translation has its uses.

Of history, I chose to read only contemporaneous or historiographical texts—those books that give us the history of our history. My aim was not to be comprehensive (I was writing a novel, not a syllabus); I merely wished from these books to catch the quotidian in flux.

So I read around seven revolutionary memoirs, plus French travel books of the 18th century; Austin Coates but no Epifanio San Juan; Father Schumacher but not a word of Anderson. (In fact, it is perhaps the novel’s witless irony that while its trigger was a haunting lecture by Ben Anderson, my actual draft bears none of the blessings that a reading of Anderson might have cast.) The trials of finding those books are, perhaps, grist for another essay (I will only mention here that the many branches of National Bookstore will shelve the same book in as many ways). A cruel and unusual punishment imposed by my accidental writing strategy was that, when I finally began to write the text, I banned myself from reading prose published after 1896. This was tough (I diverged in one item: I kept rereading Borges). Sadly, my friends soon pointed out that a diet of Eugene Sue, Ariosto, hero hagiographers, and obscure history about insane events was not conducive to polite conversation.

My research bore out that not a single incident in the history of the Philippine revolution is, in my view, not subject to ambiguity. This is a truism of all history, true: but it is almost alarmingly so when we read Aguinaldo’s memoirs versus Ricarte’s versus Valenzuela’s versus Alejandrino’s versus even the brief and innocuous testament of the terse musician Julio Nakpil. Every text raises questions. To paraphrase that master of ambiguity, Hamlet: we are all errant truth-tellers all. Thus, in order to tell the story of our history, one must have not one but multiple ways of telling—and so in the novel, the blind memoirist’s text is riddled with critics, and in the margins the critics happily slander one another, throwing footnotes, not stones.

The only way to distill the multiple reality of such a country was to take apart its texts and ‘botch’ them, as the Danish court said of the sad Ophelia: construct a history by pointing out how it unravels. Thus my novel, a deconstructed story, might seem strange to read, though it was fun to write.

The hero I conjured, the character Raymundo Mata, was serendipitously blind in the history books and appropriately blind in my illusory version. It’s through a blurry lens that we might see clearly. What became true to me was that to finish a novel is a miraculous act of recovery. The recovery of a text, a body; the recovery of a hero, a history; the recovery of a country, a past. And so in this novel I came to terms with the reality of who I am: I write. It is an act that makes me, however temporarily, whole, and my husband, a writer, above all would understand. I say this to myself. It is small consolation, but it consoles.

It was odd to me how writing was such a joy: I looked forward to writing Raymundo Mata every day, and finishing the novel was the least of my surprises. It turns out finishing a novel is completing a past, while knowing the act is never quite done. The power of Rizal, and the power of our history, is that this genie—the exemplary postmodern text that is our country’s story—is inexhaustible. This is precisely so because these postcolonial sources are contradictory, unresolved, a cast of maddeningly personal voices with axes to grind (both amusing and not so much).

We must be glad for the patently unfinished and infuriating history that we have—our untranslatable dystranslations—our frank misreadings of who we are—our disingenuous ambiguity. In this way, it seems Filipinos must represent the complexity of everyone’s incomplete and indeterminate self, the one we grope for in the dark, and our surprising, endless resurrections.

I wrote in response to the historical allusions that troubled me as Duterte defended the killings committed under his presidency. It was published by CNN Philippines, the full article here.

“It was as if the country was caught between two mirrors, and thus in that doubling, our tragedy as a nation was made infinite. Caught between the trauma of our history and the trauma of our present, Filipinos were gaslighted. An abuser condemned an earlier abuser of the nation in order to sanction his own abuse. I found myself reeling, wondering if I had misunderstood why the country had waged revolution in the first place. This infinite regression of trauma is not for the weak of mind: but it weakens us. It further destabilizes our vague memory of that revolutionary past…

Duterte’s rant has teeth — but no virtue.

The slippery slope of his self-serving rage is that, on top of having bare knowledge of our history, now we must also misapprehend its ethics.

There are two interesting Americans of the period who wrote about life in the archipelago. One style of writing was to do captive narratives—I imagine those were popular among Americans, the way stereograph pictures of dead Filipino bodies were mass entertainment. Similar to these captive-memoirs would have been narratives of army officers, etc. Those seem to be well published. Of course, there were the travel narratives, many of them by women, Thomasite teachers and such. The other writer I am thinking of is a Conrad-esque one—his work was like a hybrid of Orwell’s Burmese Days and Conrad’s Heart of Darkness.

James Marie Hopper was an aspiring literary stylist who wrote in the vein of Joseph Conrad (Hopper seems to have been a fan of Conrad, as a letter from Conrad shows, and as the contemporaneous book reviews acknowledge). Some of the stories in Caybigan were published by the literary magazine McClure’s; he was most famous for his reports on the SF earthquake, in Harper’s—he made money enough on it to buy a home in Carmel (now Carmel-by-the-Sea), CA. He was said to have published 300 stories in his lifetime. I looked up whether or not a Filipino scholar had done any research on Hopper; could not find any references. I found him because I was looking for evidence of what seems to be an apocryphal story about Jack London—that in his time as a correspondent for the San Francisco Examiner during the Russo-Japanese war, he passed by Manila and thus owned or stole a Katipunan flag. Anyway, found no source for that rumor, but I found the work of Jack London’s friend James Marie Hopper instead. Hopper, in the Google book of Jack London’s letters, is said to have been known in the literary world as “the Kipling of the Philippines”—an intriguing, if not necessarily complimentary, epithet.

The other writer is Albert Sonnichsen, a former prisoner of war who wrote a 12 Years a Slave-type narrative, called Ten Months a Captive Among Filipinos. Mark Twain wrote Sonnichsen a very nice letter approving of his book: the memoir was, in fact, an evenhanded narration, in some places poignant, of incidents of war. Most powerful to me is his anecdote of a grieving Filipino mother offering food to the prisoner of war Sonnichsen, asking him whether gringos treated their prisoners well. It turns out the old woman’s son was a katipunero captured by US forces—a haunting mirroring in that scene. I saw Sonnichsen’s papers, including that nice autographed letter from Twain, in the New York Public Library’s Manuscripts and Archives Division when I was doing research on my never-ending novel William McKinley’s World. Sonnichsen was a Danish American captured by Aguinaldo’s army in Malolos; he was sailor who left his ship to take pictures of the outbreak of war, then the Katipunan captured him when he got off a train (or something Reds-like like that). He went all around Bulacan then Northern Luzon as a POW of the Katipunan, becoming friends with one of his captors Juan Villamor, an Ilocano general under Aguinaldo (a hero also mentioned extensively in Scott’s Ilocano Responses to American Aggression). The American senators who cross-examined Taft about Balangiga in 1902 in Affairs of the Philippine Islandswere very familiar with Sonnichsen’s captive-memoir (it was because of Sonnichsen’s book that the senators insisted to Taft on their belief that Aguinaldo himself killed Luna; Taft dissuaded them). Ten Months a Captive is available online here.

But while Sonnichsen’s captive-memoir was well-reviewed and somewhat famous, James Marie Hopper is the literary writer. He came to the Philippines in 1901 to be a teacher; he was well-known at Cal Berkeley as a football player; he grew up in Oakland (incidentally so did Sonnichsen). His father was an Irish Fenian refugee in Paris, his mother was a Parisian who took her twin sons across the seas to California (don’t know what happened to Fenian dad). Hopper was friends with Jack London, Robinson Jeffers, etc. Hopper’s book of Conradesque short stories, Caybigan, was published in 1906; including its title’s punning use of Tagalism, caybigan, for the saccharine, reflexive term Pinoys used both for themselves as colonized and Americans as colonizer—that is, amigo—I think his book Caybigan is a lot more interesting than John Sayles’s Amigo.

Being something of a modernist, Hopper drew portraits of his fellow Americans that drip with what could pass as anti-imperial critique, in that Conrad way that is both simpatico and repulsive: racist and well-meaning (it seems). I like especially Hopper’s stories of colonist-trauma—the pathetic US soldier in Iloilo from the American South whom Hopper describes with the relish Conrad gave to the nutty Russian in the Congo or the “pilgrims” in Heart of Darkness, Hopper’s beast-like Southerner in his tattered camisa climbing up banana trees in the dark of night in order to eat (the denouement is tragic, an inverse of the balikbayan-OFW tale, quite fascinating); or the farcical life of a maestro (called Thomasites in history books but portrayed with gentle but clear-eyed self-critique in Hopper, who was, of course, a maestro himself)—funny Mark-Twainish scenes of the maestro desperately catching the truant Isidro who refuses his ‘civilization.’ And so on. Hopper liberally uses Tagalog words—baguio, for typhoon, bata, tao—but also racist words like pickaninny and brownie—all in an interesting, arch voice that I cannot quite condemn or condone, so I laugh. The racism, of course, makes the entire book a bit of a travesty, but it is an instructive read. Caybigan is also available online, here.

Those two, Sonnichsen and Hopper, give one a sense of the temper and tone of some of the literary writing about the Philippines at the onset of occupation, during a global period that was, in fact, full of great human radical movement—anarchism everywhere, factory occupations in Italy, communists in Hollywood, etc. They don’t tell us why books of that sort did not have a lasting hold on American letters. Basic American education also does not include Mark Twain as anti-imperialist, for instance, or MLK as socialist. High school students always read Gatsby but never Sinclair Lewis. And so on. The lack of American canonical literary writing on the American occupation of the Philippines does tell us that American letters is highly ideological, and rightwingish: the canon is made by a bunch of twits whose main job is to take wedgies out of their asses; canons aren’t about genuine thought but about lasting reaction. Sonnichsen actually became a freedom fighter in Montenegro, and then a leader of the cooperative movement in Connecticut (whatever that is). Hopper became a World War 1 war correspondent. The 2 were by no means great writers, but they were two of the better ones, and they were more interesting voices than the much-published, stupid “historians,” like money-grubbing, gold-mine-owning, artifact-grabbing Dean Worcester. Or Forbes and Blount.

My sense is that those 2, Sonnichsen and Hopper, were exceptions, ‘better’ Americans than the usual kano in the Philippines. No wonder a writer born of erudite parents of the Spanish period, like Nick Joaquin, had disdain for the era he grew up in, the prewar years of the American occupation (at least I see that in his stories; don’t know much about his personal views); his country’s occupiers were louts, embezzlers, midget minds out to make a buck. Not to mention very tiresome racists. McCoy captures those Americans, with fine portraits of Rough Rider Leonard Wood’s stock-market-swindler son—a son of a governor-general (favorite friend of TR) who used his influence to fleece investors in Manila and New York, etc—and other filthy characters (not excepting the annoying Filipinos, like Quezon), in his essential book Policing America’s Empire (not available online, but available at Ateneo de Manila bookstore).

Both Sonnichsen and Hopper, coincidentally, were sons of immigrant Americans (one man’s father was from Denmark, the other man’s family emigrated from France) who grew up in California. They were not the Midwestern Indian-war veterans or Southern farm goonies who made up most of the U.S. volunteer soldiers. Hopper, I imagine, was also quite different from the pious, semi-literate Christians from Ohio or Arkansas who made up the Thomasites. In general, most of the Americans who came to the country were probably like swamp people in Flannery O’Connor or Faulkner (Hopper tells a story of one of them in the opening tale of his book Caybigan). At least, that is the very unkind interpretation I make from the documents of the Filipino-American war period, which mostly come from US Army files or government documents—such texts not being beacons of enlightenment.

I see that there is a petition going around to get CHED to show Heneral Luna in schools. I’d say that should go with a list of books and texts to read on the revolution and especially the war against the Americans. Here would be my choices, apart from the usual suspects (Agoncillo textbooks, Rizal’s novels [must read], and so on). I read these doing research for The Revolution According to Raymundo Mata and for my new novel, William McKinley’s World, and I annotate a few of the books here. In my view, all of these books should be reprinted, if they are not online. CHED should reprint the out of print books.

These hearings begin with the testimony of William Howard Taft, the governor-general. This etext has a search function, so just search Aguinaldo or Paterno or Buencamino or Luna and see what Taft or Macarthur or Otis says about them. (Buencamino and Paterno were the leaders of the Federalistas—early collaborators with the Americans.) [oops, I lied: search function does not work.] Taft’s patronizing comments on Aguinaldo, in particular, make us understand how much our own revulsion toward Aguinaldo may also be constructed, partly, by American prejudice: very interesting. (Which is not to say that Aguinaldo does not deserve his sad place in history.) The senators ask Taft about the assassination of Luna: they believe that Aguinaldo has confessed to killing him; Taft disagrees. Etc. Interesting to hear abut these events from the enemy’s side. Arthur MacArthur also testifies (he has an interesting pompous, bombastic academic voice, like a teacher giving a lesson). It will be useful for students to see how modern-day Philippines was constructed by imperialists quite ignorant of the Philippines (and by a few nice racist anti-imperialists as well, equally ignorant). In this way, we might see how present-day self-loathing is also mirrored in the imperialists’ loathing of the Filipinos. Also, if we hear ourselves described in the words of racists, we might be able to understand the power of the colonial voice in us. Or, how much that racism shapes us. NOTE: Ironically, these hearings were convened after the scandal of the American atrocities in Samar. The aftermath of Jacob Howling Wilderness Smith’s “kill and burn” response to the Balangiga uprising resulted in the faux-‘investigations’ of the Lodge Commission and this set of hearings in 1902. Taft, A. MacArthur, Elwell Otis, etc testify, and so do many American soldiers who survived Balangiga, and so on. But no Filipino testifies: there is no Filipino voice in Affairs in the Philippine Islands.

Mabini is an extremely elegant writer (I moved from the Spanish to the English to read his memoir/histoire of the revolution), and I think he’s the best stylist on the revolution. My joke in Raymundo Mata is that Aguinaldo never recovered from Mabini’s prose style. Mabini absolutely cuts Aguinaldo in the memoir—his great pen is worse than a bolo knife. Apparently Mabini did not include his own doubts about Luna in his memoir (his doubts hinge though on Luna as a politician, not as a general): but he absolutely blames Aguinaldo for Luna’s death. What we must admire about Mabini is that he refused to pledge allegiance to the Americans; he got shipped to Guam instead. He and Ricarte are similar in that way—they chose exile over allegiance to the enemy.

Vivencio Jose,The Rise and Fall of Antonio Luna, a juicy book that I have not reread. I read it long ago. This, I believe, is the definitive biography of Antonio Luna. (NOTE: I was the editor of a biography of Jose Cojuangco that mentions his aunt Ysidra Cojuangco’s rumored love affair with Luna; of course, the book debunks it, but also without evidence, just as the rumors of their affair have no evidence. I see the story of Ysidra as Ysabel in the movie to be seductive but not convincing; great for a movie though.)

Jose Alejandrino,The Price of Freedom. Alejandrino was an officer in the Luna Division, but he was also the brother of a great general under Aguinaldo, Joaquin. Alejandrino says he wasn’t salvaged along with the others in Luna’s circle because he believes Aguinaldo was afraid of making his brother Joaquin angry.

Santiago Alvarez,The Katipunan and the Revolution. This is the most comic among the revolutionary memoirs; its great details are amazingly pungent (therefore, some say, likely lies). But all the war memoirs must be taken with a grain of salt (or maybe bagoong). They were written years after the events, with, in my view, many traumatized memories, as the writers are men who lost their war, and their competing, dueling versions of who was the hero and who was not are part of the cost of our occupation, a symptom also, who knows, of our trauma. Alvarez was the son of the leader of the Magdiwang, Mariano Alvarez, related by marriage to Bonifacio. The Alvarez family took Bonifacio in when he escaped into Cavite. His memoir is in Tagalog, since he is Caviteño; it is translated by Paula Carolina Malay (wife of Armando Malay, I think). Santiago Alvarez has a great memory for stupid yet excellent details, such as a scene of diarrhea during a battle because they were so hungry they ate rotting watermelons.

Artemio Ricarte,Memoirs. Anything about or by Ricarte is worth reading. I do love how he ended up owning a turo-turo diner in japan. Or something like that.

Of course, Emilio Aguinaldo also wrote his memoirs (he wrote two, in fact), Mga Gunita and Saloobin; but each must be taken with a grain of bagoong.

Reynaldo Ileto,The Filipinos and Their Revolution, and Pasyon and Revolution. Indispensable for thinking about what the historian Ileto calls the ‘third realm,’ the peasant world of Christ-tropes and anting-anting faith that is one of the very few books that analyzes the revolution from below. It is important to recognize that the history of the revolution we are normally taught is an ilustrado history: it is history from above. And to teach the revolution, we need to be aware of our own class consciousness, and the class ideologies inherent in the way history has been written. The Manila-consciousness, of course, is a given: that Manila-fantasy aspect of our history should also be part of our awareness in teaching the revolution. Ileto does many things that deconstruct such fantasies; in the process, of course, like anyone else, he creates his own. But that, too, is a given: it is a part of the neurotic, ordinary braid of writing about history, a hazard of the revolution.

Resil Mojares,The Brains of the Revolution. Among others, Mojares casts a sympathetic gaze on Pedro Paterno (even as he recognizes, of course, this buffoon’s huge faults), and while I disagree that we need to waste any time on sympathizing in any way with Paterno, who had an amazing propensity for betraying the revolution while ostensibly allying himself with it [a truly weird guy whom Rizal mocks in code in one of his journals, and the one moment in Helen Taft’s racist memoir of her years in the Philippines that I kind of nodded at was her laughing over Paterno’s obsequiousness], Mojares’s judicious common sense is necessary in any list of books on any topic on the Philippines.

Simeon Villa,Aguinaldo’s Odyssey. Simeon Villa was a doctor in Aguinaldo’s army as it fled north after the defeat at Malolos; Villa was captured with Aguinaldo in Palanan. His diary was thus captured by the Americans as well, and it is one of the documents in the Philippine Revolutionary Records. It also exists in J.R.M. Taylor’s extremely annoying translated volume The Philippine Insurrection Against the United States. I read through that volume in the New York Public Library, and Taylor’s ignorant annotations on the Philippines are nauseating, more so because he was the translator of our story. In any case Villa is not a very good writer, or at least he is not an emotional one—an odd thing, as General Villa is the father of the poet Jose Garcia Villa (Villa the poet hated his dad, however—which is a different story). But Dr. Villa’s narrative is important because it documents the barefoot, scarring travails of the last dregs of the desperate troops of Aguinaldo, hunted relentlessly by the men of Arthur MacArthur, in particular the implacable Javert-like fiend, Fred Funston (I imagine Funston like a pirate, with a patch in his eye). In Villa’s rather autistic voice, the ilustrado nature of the Filipino officers remains problematic, but even so, his diary is terribly sad—it ends right on the date of their capture: with an eerie lack of foreknowledge. As far as I know, Villa’s book is the only extant memoir written during the war.

Orlino Ochosa,The Tinio Brigade: Anti-American Resistance in the Ilocos Provinces. This is a good companion volume with William Henry Scott’s on the Ilocanos. Someone should make a movie of Manuel Tinio. He is one of the revolution’s most successful generals. He was on the boat with Aguinaldo back from Hong Kong, but he was actually only eighteen when he joined the war against Spain. But he was such an able general he soon took charge of the northern army against the Americans. He surrendered to the Americans after Aguinaldo was captured. Note how no one knows much about Tinio—the heroes of the American war are not enshrined the way the Spanish war heroes were. I imagine one reason might be the fact that they became politicians after the war. Tinio did not write a memoir.

William Henry Scott,Ilocano Responses to American Aggression. Scott is very meticulous and gives a good survey of the peasants, the towns, the provinces, and the heroes and the enemy occupiers in the Filipino-American war. It is a good book for recognizing the daily life but also the high stakes in the war—that we began as an anti-imperialist nation—and our loss in that war brands us, sears us, so much so that we have forgotten that war. At the end of his book, Scott muses on that fascinating gap—the lack of memoirs detailing our war against the Americans. Filipinos do not write the story. None of the heroic northerners in Scott’s book wrote their memoirs—most wrenching would have been Manuel Tinio’s memoir: perhaps the most honorable and successful among the Filipino generals in Scott’s book. The paragraph on his surrender to the Americans is heartbreaking. But Tinio never wrote his own story down. Scott notes that one great revolutionary against the Americans, Juan Villamor, wrote an unpublished chronicle, Inedita Cronica de la Guerra Americana-Filipina en el Norte de Luzon, 1899-1901, but even that unfinished chronicle, projected to be three parts, has part 1 and part 3 but not part 2: the section on battles against the Americans. The only Filipino-American war memoir that exists intact is Simeon Villa’s. Even the very talkative memoirist Santiago Alvarez, for instance, does not talk much about the battles against the Americans—he focuses on his time with Bonifacio, and he ends with some funny addenda on the colorum; Ricarte focuses on the Bonifacio period as well, with some huge swaths of (I imagine justified) vitriol against Aguinaldo. The lack of emphasis on the Americans in the movie Heneral Luna is just one more war story that for some reason cannot address adequately that imperial war, as if the American war is an undigested, indigestible bitter pill that we have yet to swallow in the story of the making of our nation. The tendency in history is to move on quickly into the Quezon era, and then World War 2, when America is our unedited hero. It’s a weird gap in the Philippine story, the American war.

Sonnichsen was a fairly liberal-leaning man (still has racist traces, though) who was captured in Malolos. He was a kid from Oakland, CA, part Danish. The book’s trope is that of a white man taken by the natives (like those American tales of being kidnapped by Native Americans). In captivity, he meets some key figures like Juan Villamor, teaches English to a mayor, learns Spanish from his fellow prisoners (some Spanish POWs), watches a revolutionary fiesta, eats a lot of bibingka, and so on. Some very moving scenes in the book, such as when a Filipino mother feeds him and asks him about how Americans treat their prisoners—turns out her son was captured by the Americans. Sonnichsen’s papers are in the New York Public Library, and he ended up joining the independence rebels in Macedonia after his capture in the Philippines. Wondered if his time captured by revolutionaries made him join a different war.

Alfred McCoy,Policing America’s Empire. This gives devastating light on why the revolution so spectacularly failed—trust me, it is not our fault. It is also not Aguinaldo’s fault. Our self-loathing is misplaced. The brutal counterinsurgency and policing methods of the Americans were abominable, relentless, rapacious, outrageous. Scandal-making and spying and ferreting out blackmail-worthy secrets on postwar katipuneros are only a few of the sidelights that explain why the stories of the American war do not exist. People were hounded into silence, collaboration, allegiance, and so on. Of course, many were likely going to be venal anyway, like Quezon (he seems to have been a spy, more or less, or at least a well-groomed informant, for the infamous U.S. constabulary chief of Manila, Bandholtz). Quezon especially does not go down well in this book; but nobody does. But the fact is, the venality of any Filipino intriguero in the American years must be balanced with the implacable policing system that both anticipates the Marcos era but also creates it. The spy, policing, and military system of the Americans is inextricable from its effects: even though one may also see that that past system may not be the direct cause of our current state and atrocities, the thread is indelible. If one split our history in half, with the American era (up to 1946) on one side and folded the other half (1946 and beyond) over it, we’d simply be creating a mirror montage: the American era facing the post-American era, and the spy and military structures of each would mirror the other: the corrupt and relentlessly self-serving age of the American occupation is embalmed in the failed forms of governance we know now.

“These two diverse and compelling collections represent the finest talent in contemporary writing and editorial guidance in a world where homeland is mutable, distance is relative, identity is fluid and exile is never far away.”

Thanks to Arnika Fuhrmann, the Southeast Asia Studies Department, and the University Lecture Committee at Cornell University for nominating me to do a University Lecture this fall. I’ll be talking about my novel in progress, William McKinley’s World, and my research on the Filipino-American War.

A footnote to this note: Benedict Anderson, to whom so many of us are indebted, not only for his books, Imagined Communities, Under Three Flags, and others, but for his generosity (both as a thinker and as a man), introduced my talk. I was so hugely honored. It was the first and only time I met him. He died a few weeks later, in Indonesia. I publish here photos with Ben at dinner. Requiescat.